removing wslview from Ubuntu-only computers?

[Keith]

On 4/3/23 3:27 PM, Little Girl wrote:
> Hey there,
> 
> Keith wrote:
> 
>> Apt installing wslu didn't just happen arbitrarily.

Well, actually I was wrong about that (and said so in my apology to 
Marco) because as I discovered after I posted the above, the Firefox 
transitional deb package is not included on fresh installs, just 
upgrades. So, for some people it was arbitrary.

> 
> In my case, gimp-help-en is attempting to force me to use it daily
> ever since the very first time I dared to click on GIMP's "Help" menu
> about a year ago.

Gimp-help-en is dependent on the virtual package, www-browser, not wslu 
specifically. Installing another package from this list:
$ apt-cache search www-browser --names-only
will satisfy that dependency. Either a text-based or lightweight gui web 
browser would be adequate for viewing html documentation like that found 
in the gimp-help-en package. If you are using the Firefox snap, you 
could install the firefox deb which would also solve the problem. You 
can then remove wslu.

> 
>> Install a package with a dependency on www-browser -> Apt installs
>> wslu because it provides www-browser (Provides: www-browser) to
>> satisfy that dependency.
> 
> This is the problem right here and needs to be solved. The wslu
> package should never, ever have even been considered as a suitable
> candidate for satisfying that dependency. Hopefully that will now be
> corrected.
> 
>> But in general this has little to do Firefox being supplied as a
>> snap package. Removing or replacing the default installed Firefox
>> deb just highlighted the problem.
> 
> Perhaps, but we've only encountered the problem with this Snap
> version of Firefox in place, so it's yet another burden that we
> wouldn't have had placed upon us if the Snap version weren't used or
> if the team who wanted to use it had ironed out its kinks before
> rolling it out - especially in an LTS release.

Well, its not that Firefox is provided as a snap. It's that the firefox 
transitional deb package isn't present on fresh installations like it is 
for upgrades so there's no default package that provides the www-browser 
dependency. In this case, whenever a package that does depend on 
www-browser is installed, apt chooses wslu instead of a more appropriate 
package like one that actually contains a web browser program. As I 
leave it here, this is a deficiency in apt and probably the policy 
regarding the use of virtual packages.

Btw, if snap was never a thing and Ubuntu chose instead to start using 
flatpaks or even appimages for containerized applications, you'd run 
into the same problem. I don't believe it's specific to snap package 
management.

-- 
Keith